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Abstract

This is the last of three reports on Black Geographies. Through theories then practices of Black creativity, the report highlights the need for critical engagements with creativity, as necessary to Black life but not innocent in racial capitalism.

Keywords

Black creativity Black Geographies Black turn creativity racial capitalism

I Introduction

My third and final report focuses on Black Geographies¹ of creativity. A focus and justification of Black Geographies, as a thriving sub-discipline of Geography (see Noxolo 2022, 2024), is ‘the spatialities of racial capitalism’ (Hawthorne and Lewis, 2023: 7), that is, the understanding that Black life is constrained and threatened in a global system that is anti-Black in its processes and at its foundations (see Chari, 2022; Gilmore, 2022), taking diverse local forms (see Matlon, 2023). In such a violent system of racialised exploitation, beginning with colonial genocides and enslavement and working through to everyday displacements and environmental injustice, creativity has always been necessary for continued Black existence. In this context, Black creativity is a heightened attention to underlying logics of endangerment, combined with a liberatory capacity to see beyond the current system and create something new. Sixty years ago, James Baldwin (1995 [1964]: 98) spoke with profound insight: the Black person in a white supremacist world ‘is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words’. The starting point for this report is therefore that creativity is not the fluff on top of Black Geographies, but the hard bedrock of survival. Without it there are no Black geographies.

The following report’s citations cut across porous disciplinary lines. Black Geographies is understood as integral to what might be thought of as a broader interdisciplinary ‘Black turn’ that includes, for example, Black histories (e.g. Adi, 2023), and Black anthropologies (Burnett, 2017; Gray, 2024; McMillen, 2023; Sobers, 2023). The ‘Black turn’, itself encouraged through the renewed attention to racism and anti-racism invoked by the international campaigning of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement (Barwick and Nayak, 2024), comes in the wake of a longer-term spatial turn (Smith and Katz, 1993), and has been particularly encouraged by the transdisciplinary take-up of classic Black Geographies work, such as that of Katherine McKittrick (2021, 2006). Black Geographies is also part of the interdisciplinary ebb and flow of institutionalised Black Studies, contributing to and learning from a range of disciplinary manifestations of anti-racism and Black life (e.g. Sharpe, 2023; Wright, 2015). Black Geographies feeds into and is fed across disciplines. It generates intriguing spatial questions, made more urgent through the creative spatial practices of Black communities internationally (and also, I will argue, through the flexible creativity of anti-Black racisms). For example, Black Studies scholars draw on Black Geographies to engage critically with issues of displacement, such as gentrification and the fraught spatialities of Black disabilities (e.g. Owens, 2023; Schalk, 2022). In Psychology, Fike and Mattis (2024), for example, focus on urban neighbourhood perceptions amongst young Black adults, whilst in Anthropology and in Visual and Creative Arts, Black Geographies provides a repertoire of spatialised questions around some fundamental issues in image, craft and the materiality of the home and neighbourhood (Mullings et al., 2021; Sinclair, 2023; see also Télémaque, 2024).

This report proceeds as follows. Recognising that creativity is necessary to Black life but is far from innocent in relation to racism, the first section considers racism and anti-racism as entangled creativities. The second section reviews recent work on Black creative practice as Black time and space that is always emergent in the face of erasure. Finally, the conclusion sounds a warning note around the contingent institutionalisation of Black Geographies across the transnational academy.

II The entangled creativity of racism and anti-racism

To think of capitalist development as not only drawing on individual and collective creativity, but as itself creative, is far from new. As many have observed (see e.g. Trend, 2020; Vergès, 2021), the creativity of capital resides in its unending capacity to re-shape and renew forms of extraction and exploitation of labour and of nature. In its racialised formations (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Robinson, 1983), capital is just as flexible and responsive, dynamic and contingent, molten and multiple, as it is in any other aspect. This means that creativity itself, though often encouraged as a positive attribute that is itself exploitable for profit (Edensor et al., 2010), is neither politically nor morally innocent. Creativity requires critical engagement.

Purifoy and Seamster (2021) term the parasitism of white settlements in relation to Black towns as ‘creative extraction’. In their analysis of Black-founded towns in post-segregationist US, Black places are characterised not just by the skin colour of their current population but more by the structured racialised exploitation that underlies post-segregationist US urbanisation processes: they ‘are linked by a number of existential threats, manifested in the form of land grabs, environmental risks, political exclusion, denial of basic services and other tactics aimed at both stifling Black-centred development and redirecting resources to bolster white development’ (Purifoy and Seamster, 2021: 48) . By analogy with Schumpeter’s (1950 [1942]) ‘creative destruction’, in which obsolescence is the silenced partner of innovation, creative extraction silences the destructive exploitation of Black towns (through, e.g., environmental damage and land grabs) through which the wealth of neighbouring white towns is created. Here, the creativity of capital is multiple: it lies both in the active creation of value, and in the creative or inventive moves by which exploitation becomes simultaneously integral to and erased within the act of creating value.

The everyday insecurity that Black communities experience through such forms of creative extraction is a byproduct of the creativity of capital. To be structured into the existential threats of racialised disadvantage requires creative survival work, day by day by day. King (2024), for example, recalls the Negro Motorist Green Book, created by postal worker Victor Hugo Green. African American drivers used the ‘green book’ during segregation to avoid the so-called ‘sundown towns’ in which there was an explicit threat of violence to Black people who were found out in public late at night. King (2024: 46) uses the ‘green book’ as an example of the time Black people have had to spend avoiding racism – the cost of capitalist creativity – and sees this labour not only as time lost, but also as a loss of something more: ‘Time lost equates to more than a loss of minutes or seconds or even hours from one day. It is a loss of personhood and self-autonomy of Black folks’. Hartman (2008: 6) expresses the yearning that arises from a similar loss, the historic silencing of the voices of enslaved people that gives rise to creative story telling now, as a form of compensation. Her poetic phrasing gives a sense of the tiresome lag or drag of living every day with loss, even when the response is creative: ‘loss gives rise to longing’.

The time-consuming communal creativity around finding safe spaces in a world made dangerous through a wide range of structured insecurities (see also Okoye, 2024) has continued into practices of Black mobility in the 21st century through the use of social media to warn about and commentate unsafe spaces (Dillette et al., 2019). The creative digital response of some Black cyberfeminists, exhausted from the ‘hustle culture’ that is itself a response to the precarities of structured inequality, is to tell each other stories of sleep and rest, by posting online images of Black people in repose (Francois, 2019; Monier, 2023). Such digital moves are creative voicings of a banal extraction that is silenced, an everyday search for compensatory respite for what is lost.

We see here a critical tension in Black creativity as it plays out in the context of structured racial capitalism – ongoing, grinding existential crisis necessitates creative work that can itself be exhausting, but that also holds within it an earnest, or a promise, that a changed world can be created. The second section of this report speaks more about this, but Ibrahim and Ahad (2022: 3) consider this relationship between emergency and emergence in the quotidian crisis of Black life. Claudia Rankine (2015: 126), in her hauntingly lyrical essay, quotes from Bhabha (see below in the context of creative citation) to concisely express the creativity immanent in ongoing crisis: ‘The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence’.

One point I want to make here is that Black geographers analyse, but increasingly go beyond analysing, the ravages of racial capitalism. Regan McDonald (2022: 10) warns that ‘Consequent of erasure, Black placemaking and “freedom dreams” are obscured from much of the literature dealing with race, limiting the potential for emancipatory futures within Geography’. Given that creative erasure is so crucial to capitalist exploitation, it is of course imperative to name racialised violence (Scott, 2024). However, Katherine McKittrick (2014) has warned of the dangers of obsessive, quasi-pornographic, attention to Black death and suffering that maintains a focus on the destructive creativity of what is done to us, rather than the creative agency of Black people in the face of anti-Blackness. Instead, to focus on the emergence of emancipatory futures is to give space to demands placed on and for the future of a diverse humanity, through an insistence on Black people as creative agents.

Evidently, at a time of planetary crisis – in the specificity of what Michelle Wright (2015) calls the ‘now’ or what Stuart Hall (2006) expressed as the current conjuncture or ‘moment’ – we must think both with and beyond the human (Jackson, 2020). As part of this, meanings of Blackness (and of anti-Blackness) are not fixed in their relation to the human, the animal and the planetary, but constantly achieve new meaning ‘through the continual updating of intersecting interpellations in the “now”’ (Wright, 2015: 172). To understand the ‘pluralities of Black Geographies’ (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019), their variation across space and time, requires attention to how new identities are called into being, or interpellated, in new or relatively localised political moments, created not just by building or drawing on what already existed but also in relation to new opportunities and convergences (Hall, 2017 [1979]). Hagan (2023), for example, explores the subtly shifting interpellations of diverse Black identities in refugees’ lives, in the specific context of the Nigerien state’s complicity in European migration controls. Equally Abdoumaliq Simone (2022: 193; see also Daley and Murrey, 2022) notes the ‘open contestation’ around the meanings of Blackness amongst different student bodies in Khartoum, Dakar and Douala: ‘Blackness in African contexts… was often invoked in the sense of marking particular kinds of distinctions of eligibility, cultural practice, entitlement and social capacity within student bodies...’ Focussing on the agency of the individual to be interpellated multiply in our chaotic, multipolar times, Michelle Wright (2015: 118) terms as ‘epiphenomal interpellation… this choice, this possibility of reading oneself or not reading oneself into any number of collective identities that occur in the moment’.

To grope towards some sense of the complexity needed in the now, we might make use of recent Black and anti-racist experiments with quantum theory (Barad, 2018; Noxolo, 2024; Wright, 2015). If we think, for example, of the politics of racism and anti-racism as indissolubly entangled (Noxolo, 2020) sets of practices, or as intra-acting to mutually create and re-create each other (Barad, 2007), then we can think about Black Geographies in a fundamentally hopeful way. This is a more radical way of thinking about Black creativity, as that which brings life into being from and in the moment of racialised destruction, marshalling what always already exists - for there is never really nothing (Barad, 2018) - into what can make new (for similar ideas, expressed as Black potentiality in the midst of racialised destruction, see Simone, 2023).

III Geographies of Black creative practice: Critical engagements with the ‘B-side’

So what emancipatory futures are emerging in the geographies of Black creative practice? For Black people, to not only survive now but to imagine a future, is to inhabit a time outside of the present time, what Goffe (2022: 110) calls the ‘B-side’ of history: ‘[Black temporality] exists on the other side, not simply outside or excluded from time, but on the B-side of time and thus history’. These ‘alternative temporal registers’ (King, 2024: 37) are most readily expressed and perceived through Black musical creativity, through the complex engagements with diverse ‘beats’ in Black people’s lives. Different beats, genres and forms of musical creation map onto different spatialities in Black life, feeding from and into a range of creative spatial practice. James (2023: 12), for example, writing about the urban conditions that produced Prince and the Minneapolis Sound considers musical production as one answer to his intriguing question: ‘How does racialisation across the urban soundscape inadvertently produce the conditions for its own subversion?’ More explicitly, in relation to New York hip hop’s musical and visual arts cultures, Shabazz (2021: 449 and 451) describes the process by which they arrive: ‘Out of the abandonment, geographic containment and razing of the South Bronx… hip hop was born… The city became an art studio where B-girls and B-boys, emcees, DJ’s and arousal artists used subway trains and stations, walls, parks and abandoned buildings, as sites for the expression of hip hop’.

Beat and lyrics working together in Black music can be explicit in their anti-racist politics, partly because of their spatial routing in, from and through Africa and the Caribbean (see e.g. Duby, 2022; Stanley Niaah, 2008). For example, in Taylor-Stone’s (2024) interview with Pauline Black, one of the most important female singers in the United Kingdom’s late 20th century Ska movement, there is clear recognition that Jamaican ska arose out of the politicised decolonial moment of 1960s Jamaica, whilst Trinidadian calypso and soca are popular musical traditions that are steeped in political commentary. Birthed from both of these musical routes, as well as punk rock in the United Kingdom, Twotone’s anti-racist politics spoke directly both from and into everyday experiences of racism for the post-Windrush generation. So, although we should heed Stuart Hall’s (1996) warnings that monetised Black creative practice is both complicit and emancipatory, for Pauline Black, this instance of creative practice in the United Kingdom was a direct expression of anti-racist politics.

In creative practice, connections with anti-racist politics can be more ambiguous though. In the 1980s, when Jamaican DJ Yellowman asked his excited audience, ‘What do you want, consciousness or slackness?’ (Stanley Niaah, 2006: 182), he pointed to an openness among creative practice, activism and politics. Where ‘consciousness’ often denotes overt political expression, ‘slackness’ can describe dancehall’s explicitly sexualised lyrics and performance, which are often criticised as meaningless hedonism or as gendered oppression and self-stereotyping (Cooper, 2020, 2004) – and certainly, as a student leaping about to ska, funk and disco in 1980s Manchester (see Noxolo, 2021), I was surrendering to joyfully and erotically embodied pleasure, with or without a thought for explicit politics. But Stanley Niaah (2006) goes on to point out that ‘slackness’ can also mean criticism of state neglect of poorer Black neighbourhoods: unchecked violence, rubbish in the streets and a lack of care. And of course, dance and lyrics that some might dismiss as mindless can also be read as rest and recuperation, a freeing up of Black bodies and minds in the dancehall space, a respite from racialised oppression (Hope, 2006). Bearing these multiple meanings in mind, we can achieve some complexity in our understanding of why, to Yellowman’s question, ‘slackness’ was the audience’s enthusiastic answer (Stanley Niaah, 2006). (See also Palmer (2014) on the more ambiguous intersections between gender, sexuality and racialised politics in the UK reggae genre, Lovers Rock, as well as Chapman (2023) on the distinctive communities created in the US’s Black punk mosh pits; for more on Black punk, see Spooner and Terry, 2023).

The well-known and abundant creativity of Black music is perhaps the reason why many, including Heitz (2021), talk about the creativity of Black everyday spatial agency as a ‘vibe’. For diversely marginalised Black people – young, queer, poor and rural – creativity is required just in inhabiting urban spaces, and more so in speculating on hopeful futures. Okoye (2024), in her study of Black adolescents’ sense of place in the urban neighbourhood of Nima, Accra, notes how young people create ‘embodied performances of poetry, jumping rope and dancing [demonstrating how] they depend on, connect with and borrow potential from surrounding beings, magically transforming themselves and community space’. Vasudevan (2023) and Khuzwayo (2023) both map the areas of the city – the volleyball court in Dominican Republic, the nightclub in South Africa – in which Black queer young people find spaces of unconditional community (see also Jolly, 2024; Eaves, 2017, on the contingency in relationships with Black community, often experienced by Black queer young people). Finally, in Brazilian Quilombos (Gois, 2023) and in post-sharecropping communities in the US south (Cuellar, 2023), rural landscapes are places of creative, though often contested, forms of settlement and reimagination for Black communities.

Given the im/possibility of Black spatial agency – always erased and yet always present (Noxolo, 2020; see also Cummings, 2019, on the im/possibility of Black British queer studies) – Black Geographies continues to document creative forms of protest, including around commemorative landmarks and statues (Godfrey, 2024; Philogene Heron, 2022). Activists themselves are often too caught up in the exigencies of the historical moment to reflect in writing on their own creativity (but see Abbas et al., 2023), but archivists and historians are alongside geographers in opening up these histories (see e.g. Adams, 2023). One classic testament to spatial activism is from Gilmore’s (2007) chapter on the female-led group Mothers Reclaiming our Children (Mothers ROC). In contesting the state’s carceral approach to Black men in their communities (see also Shabazz, 2015), the women organised diverse and creative forms of protest, including creating safe spaces for funerals and sitting in court to act as critical witnesses in judicial processes that could not be fully trusted. In all this, motherhood became a touchstone collective identity, because of its power to figure women as (re)productive creators. (See also Harriott and Jaffe, 2018, on the powerful impact of the ‘mother-citizen’ in court testimonies around the deaths of 74 people at the Tivoli Incursion in Jamaica, in May 2010). Nonetheless, gendered activism can be subject to its own insecurities. In Atlanta, Rodriguez (2024) notes that housing movements led by Black women tenants historically built a culture of collective care. These movements built strength over the twentieth century, but eventually eviction and displacement dispersed their hard-fought ‘care capital’ (Rodriquez, 2024: 755). Chillingly, Muñoz (2023) describes how Councilwoman Marielle Franco paid the ultimate price for her commitment to favela communities in Brazil.

My final points before concluding relate to creativity and its limits in academic activism. In the complexity of the current moment, where politically it is important that knowledge production becomes somewhat entangled with identity production (Noxolo, 2022; Noxolo and Hamis, 2023), there is a need to be creative in our anti-racist academic strategies, not least through creative citation. Beyond citational accuracy alone, as McKittrick (2021) elaborates it, citation can be a politics of creatively reconstituting the collective through conscious re-stitching, a practice of reconnecting the threads that constitute us. Claudia Rankine (2014) plays with citations in her creative essay, layering them one on top of another to create connection as well as meaning. For example, the quote I mentioned earlier: ‘The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence’ (Rankine, 2014: 126) is part of a meditation on the grossly racist violence directed against Zinedine Zidane at the 2006 World Cup. But the quote is explicitly cited as coming from Homi Bhabha (1994: 41), who is himself quoting and explicating Fanon (1986 [1952]), as part of a discussion of the creative challenging of conventional notions of time and progress that anti-racist practice demands. So Rankine, in exploring a specific moment of spectacularly nasty racism, re-narrates it as what it least intends to be: an instance of anti-racist community. Creative citation can resituate each specific and diverse racism as ‘a singular testament to an ongoing set of unfinished conversations’ (Akomfrah, 2017: 191; see also Noxolo, 2016).

Yet, even creative academic activism has its limits. It does not necessarily remove the unknowability of Black women, within racialised state structures that are not designed to see us (Hartman, 2019; McKittrick, 2006). Perhaps we should not wish it to. Intriguingly, Mallory (2024: 116) talks through the productive politics of unknowability in specific cases, both in activism and in scholarship: ‘Unknowability can be thought of as a framework from which scholarly inquiry begins’. In the case of Renisha McBride (a Black teenager in Detroit, Michigan, United States, who was fatally shot by a white homeowner whom she encountered when she was looking for help after a car accident), the inability to easily categorise her movements led to an uncertainty over the times and spaces surrounding her murder. Renisha’s family deployed this unknowability, the difficulty of definitively classifying her actions and status that day, to undermine the homeowner’s reliance on the conventional ‘stand your ground’ defence, by ‘call[ing] into question what is not known’ (Mallory, 2024: 123).

IV Conclusion

This third report comes at a time when Black Geographies has burgeoning institutional recognition, particularly in the United States: there is a Black Geographies Speciality Group of the Association of American Geographers, and there are Black Geographies research groups at Berkeley and at UC Santa Cruz. In the United Kingdom, two explicitly Black Geographies posts have been named and recruited, both in Scotland. However, these hopeful signs are happening in the context of wider interdisciplinary threats for Black and anti-racist scholarship. The ongoing global marginalisation of African universities continues unabated, despite African scholars'commendable creativity in the face of persistent coloniality (Kessi et al., 2020); the culture wars that demonise critical race studies continue in the United States; and in the United Kingdom, at the time of writing, there are active campaigns to keep open key Black-focused masters courses – History of Africa and the African Diaspora at Chichester ( https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/university-of-chichester-students-british-african-chichester-b1140229.html) and Black British History at Goldsmiths (https://www.change.org/p/save-black-british-history-at-goldsmiths), as well as Black British Literature at Goldsmiths (https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/jul/03/goldsmiths-accused-of-being-determined-to-close-black-british-literature-course) – in the context of wider financial restructuring and redundancies in the higher education sector.

To find transnational solidarity, there is a need for ‘cross-fertilization’ (Daley and Murrey, 2022: 171) across Blackness as lived and produced in a wider range of localities. We cannot assume solidarity: instead we must carefully engage with the unequal and colonialist geographies of knowledge production (Falola, 2022; Marchais et al., 2020; Ssentongo, 2020), that have produced mistrust. Ultimately there is a need to build solidarities across very different Black Geographies, solidarities that are always necessarily contingent, complex and above all creative.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Pat Noxolo

Note

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